Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Just out today! New book from Temple Grandin -- The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Chapter six deals with autism researchers looking only at problems and seeing all differences from the norm as links to problems. Then one researcher in Canada flipped the problem focus and found evidence for substantial talents. Familiar story with dyslexia now. Strange. Dyslexia was identified some 60-70 years before autism, yet the autism folks seem way ahead of almost all of the dyslexia research professionals. How did this happen?

About Me

Thomas G. West is the author of In the Mind’s Eye (1991 and 1997) and Thinking Like Einstein (2004). A second edition of In the Mind’s Eye was released September 4, 2009, with a new Introduction from Oliver Sacks, MD. The book has had 18 printings, been selected as one of the “best of the best” for the year by the American Library Association and has been translated into both Japanese (1994) and Chinese (2004). A Korean translation became available in late 2011. In connection with In the Mind's Eye and his second book, Thinking Like Einstein, West has been invited to give talks for scientific, medical, art, design, computer and business groups in the U.S. and overseas, including groups in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Dubai-UAE and 12 European countries. He is now working on a third book with the working title Seeing What Others Do Not See or Cannot See. It will focus on high level creativity and brain diversity -- dealing with dyslexia and Asperger syndrome along with other alternative modes of learning and thinking -- often having individuals tell their own stories in their own way.